Although LGBTQ+ populations experience significant health challenges, little research exists that investigates their health from an informational perspective. Our study addresses this gap by exploring the health information practices of LGBTQ+ communities in South Carolina, focusing on how sociocultural context shapes these practices. Thirty semi-structured interviews with South Carolina LGBTQ+ community leaders analyzed using open qualitative coding informed the development of a conceptual framework describing their information practices. Findings show that participants engaged in two broad types of practices -protective and defensive -as responses to risks and barriers experienced, which are in turn produced by social and structural factors. Findings advance information practices and marginalization approaches and offer ways for medical professionals to improve service to LGBTQ+ populations.
PurposeThis qualitative study explores how discursive power shapes South Carolina lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA+) communities' health information practices and how participants resist this power.Design/methodology/approachIn total, 28 LGBTQIA+ community leaders from South Carolina engaged in semi-structured interviews and information world mapping–a participatory arts-based elicitation technique–to capture the context underlying how they and their communities create, seek, use and share health information. We focus on the information world maps for this paper, employing situational analysis–a discourse analytic method for visual data–to analyze them.FindingsSix themes emerged describing how discursive power operates both within and outside of LGBTQIA+ communities: (1) producing absence, (2) providing unwanted information, (3) commoditizing LGBTQIA+ communities, (4) condensing LGBTQIA+ people into monoliths; (5) establishing the community's normative role in information practices; (6) applying assimilationist and metronormative discourses to information sources. This power negates people's information practices with less dominant LGBTQIA+ identities and marginalized intersectional identities across locations such as race and class. Participants resisted discursive power within their maps via the following tactics: (1) (re)appropriating discourses and (2) imagining new information worlds.Originality/valueThis study captures the perspectives of an understudied population–LGBTQIA+ persons from the American South–about a critical topic–their health–and frames these perspectives and topics within an informational context. Our use of information world mapping and situational analysis offers a unique and still underutilized set of qualitative methods within information science research.
This conceptual paper identifies future directions for information practices theoretical discourses addressing marginality, community, and embodiment. We extend arguments from critical research identifying how existing discourses fail to capture the nuanced, lived experiences of people and communities confronting marginalization, predominantly via their reinforcement of deficit narratives. We then connect a series of qualitative projects examining the information practices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual communities in the American South with relevant Library and Information Science (LIS) research to examine how marginality, community, and embodiment shape these practices. Specifically, we introduce a conceptual model that describes marginality by framing information practices as tactical and agentic responses to and refutations of social and structural barriers and risks. While some of the information practices of participants and communities appear to be uninformed or unsafe, they represent the products of community sharing and vetting. Embodied navigations further inform participant practices as they navigate information worlds produced and informed by their intersectional identities. These arguments coincide with key categories established within our model that describe information practices: defensive and protective, and community and self. Based on these insights, we offer directions for future research and theory to reorient existing discourses in ways that inspire middle-range theory building that fully captures people's lived experiences.
It is near-impossible for casual consumers of images to authenticate digitally-altered images without a keen understanding of how to “read” the digital image. As Photoshop did for photographic alteration, so to have advances in artificial intelligence and computer graphics made seamless video alteration seem real to the untrained eye. The colloquialism used to describe these videos are “deepfakes”: a portmanteau of deep learning AI and faked imagery. The implications for these videos serving as authentic representations matters, especially in rhetorics around “fake news.” Yet, this alteration software, one deployable both through high-end editing software and free mobile apps, remains critically under examined. One troubling example of deepfakes is the superimposing of women’s faces into pornographic videos. The implication here is a reification of women’s bodies as a thing to be visually consumed, here circumventing consent. This use is confounding considering the very bodies used to perfect deepfakes were men. This paper explores how the emergence and distribution of deepfakes continues to enforce gendered disparities within visual information. This paper, however, rejects the inevitability of deepfakes arguing that feminist oriented approaches to artificial intelligence building and a critical approaches to visual information literacy can stifle the distribution of violently sexist deepfakes.
Objective This qualitative research examines how transgender and gender nonbinary (T/GNB) persons from South Carolina navigate informational barriers within healthcare systems. This navigation can be described through the lens of information practices, or how T/GNB participants create, seek, use, and share information to achieve desired healthcare outcomes. Special focus is given to the roles of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in shaping these practices. Materials and Methods The research utilizes participant data from semistructured interviews and focus groups conducted with 26 T/GNB individuals focusing on their health information practices. Data analysis utilized emic/etic coding and the constant comparative method to identify themes describing transexclusionary information barriers and respondent ICT-led information practices. Results Findings note healthcare systems producing cisnormativity by design resulting in T/GNB individuals viewing healthcare spaces as exclusionary. Exclusionary barriers included over reliance on medical, expert authority ignoring T/GNB embodiment, and a lack of contextual perspective to identities. In response, T/GNB seek, create, use, and share information via ICTs to challenge exclusionary practices. Discussion T/GNB ICT use addresses systemic barriers within healthcare systems suggesting a need to reframe healthcare systems through the lens of design justice, one that values T/GNB agency in understanding and producing health knowledge. Conclusion While many healthcare providers are not intentionally being transexclusionary, the design of healthcare information systems rely on cisnormative values, thus excluding many T/GNB from accessing healthcare in comfortable and safe ways. Shifting toward the values and practices of T/GNB as informed by ICT use will afford healthcare providers ways to undo barriers to care.
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